Nestlings Quotes

“Grief is the space between two states of being: who you were and who you are.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“I think Healing begins when you finally recognize there is no moving on. Only moving forward. You don’t actually leave anything behind. You carry it with you.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Adulthood was all about compromises, wasn’t it? You decide what you need, what you want, and shift your priorities around until you find the least bad combination. Each compromise was a link in a chain, and if that chain dragged you down to the bottom of the East River? Well … at least you had Netflix and Spotify to distract you while you sank.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“There’s so much suffering in the world. So much pain. You get to be a certain age and you gain a collector’s appreciation of it.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“A garden of resentment was sown that day. Its hideous plants bloomed at irregular, unpredictable intervals. A sprig of hate. A blossom of blame. Entire teeming hedgerows of depression and alienation.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“mothers can handle a lot of sensations at once, can’t they? It’s part of the job: to be torn open and persevere.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“How much pain is caused by hiding pain from others?”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Healing begins when you finally recognize there is no moving on. Only moving forward. You don’t actually leave anything behind. You carry it with you. That’s why the process of healing can feel so slow: you’re carrying more weight now.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“heartbreak. College. Jobs. Arguments. Slammed doors. Curses. Embraces. Tears. Sharing a drink. Laughing at how hard things used to be. Becoming a friend. A confidante. Rewriting painful definitions of mothers and daughters at long last. All of these: promises that are made, tacitly or not, when a child enters your life and you believe, perhaps against better judgment, that the world will let you have them as payment for those first years of pain and confusion. She would never get these moments.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“More than anything, she needed her mind to quiet down. How was it she could spend her days so exhausted and nights so restless?”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Grief is the space between two states of being: who you were and who you are.
It’s an excruciatingly long, unlit hallway.
A staircase you have to crawl down, one interminable flight at a time.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“because the nighttime is the right time to cruise the Panic Attack Expressway,”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“He was going to eat that lunch in the goddamn sunshine, and he was going to start reading his new book.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“You always act like sentimentality is some mortal sin. There’s nothing wrong with twee!”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Motherhood was breakage, was expansion, was depletion, was fulfillment, was creation, and an endless series of goodbyes. Motherhood was contradiction. That was its beauty. That was its horror. And if it drove you mad trying to square its inconsistencies, well, tough luck, because motherhood cared nothing about what happened inside of you. Motherhood had already taken what it needed from inside of you and had given it to the world. Anything else was up to you and fate. Bashert.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Only giving birth came close. From the moment labor began, a dark and yawning tunnel had opened up, a tunnel of variables, of uncertainty. How hard will this be? What will the pain be like? How long will it last? Will I be one of those women who get to say it was over before I knew it? Will I be in labor for entire days and think it’ll never end? Or will I join the tragic sisterhood of women killed in childbirth? You can count on the mind-cleansing adrenaline to take care of the initial few hours. It’s all so new, you become reactive … but after a while, the novelty wears off and you find yourself beginning to process that this could very well be the rest of your life—and you’re just along for the ride.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“What that secret was he had no idea, it didn’t matter; what mattered was she brought you into her confidence and made you feel that exclusivity. You might not be the only other person in the room, but you were the only other person in the room who mattered.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“As all parents of an infant can attest, the world becomes a different place after some sleep. Get a couple of good nights in a row and, well, how you felt during the thick of it starts to feel like just a bad dream. Problems don’t go away, of course, but they shrink. You can stick them in your back pocket.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“garden of resentment was sown that day. Its hideous plants bloomed at irregular, unpredictable intervals. A sprig of hate. A blossom of blame. Entire teeming hedgerows of depression and alienation.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“No, the better analogy was … life was like Joni Mitchell’s entire catalog. Increasingly complex and difficult to understand but still full of face-smacking beauty if you were willing to forgo expectations and listen.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“something had irrevocably changed between them. An invisible seal in every relationship: physical violence”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Motherhood was breakage, was expansion, was depletion, was fulfillment, was creation, and an endless series of goodbyes. Motherhood was contradiction. That was its beauty. That was its horror. And if it drove you mad trying to square its inconsistencies, well, tough luck, because motherhood cared nothing about what happened inside of you. Motherhood had already taken what it needed from inside of you and had given it to the world. Anything else was up to you and fate.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“I think Healing begins when you finally recognize there is no moving on. Only moving forward. You don’t actually leave anything behind. You carry it with you. That’s why the process of healing can feel so slow: you’re carrying more weight now.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Then a horrible sensation: pulsing, spewing, something was coming out of that tube and flooding, coating, Bizzie’s insides with heat. Thick, awful fluid pumped from the old man into Bizzie.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Motherhood was breakage, was expansion, was depletion, was fulfillment, was creation and an endless series of goodbyes. Motherhood was contradiction. That was it's beauty. That was it's horror.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Mama, I don’t like this music.” Kacey ignored him, working on his jacket zipper, but Ana noticed. No music was playing. Ana filed that away as worth remembering.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Be careful you don’t get taken advantage of. One problem with absurdists is they don’t always know when something stops being funny and starts being corrosive.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Motherhood was breakage, was expansion, was depletion, was fulfillment, was creation, and an endless series of goodbyes. Motherhood was contradiction. That was its beauty. That was its horror.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“What does it mean to be a mother? But that was the trick. There was no one meaning. Motherhood was her, was Cathy, was Reid’s mom, was this monstrosity in the bowels of a Manhattan skyscraper. Motherhood was joy, was pain, was standing over the crib with a knife, was standing over the crib with a lullaby. Motherhood was breakage, was expansion, was depletion, was fulfillment, was creation, and an endless series of goodbyes. Motherhood was contradiction. That was its beauty. That was its horror. And if it drove you mad trying to square its inconsistencies, well, tough luck, because motherhood cared nothing about what happened inside of you. Motherhood had already taken what it needed from inside of you and had given it to the world. Anything else was up to you and fate.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Then when he got home, he would kiss his wife and his daughter—the two jewels of his life (and were they bittersweet sometimes? Sure. But he could push those feelings all the way down, press those grapes into holy wine, baby)—and he was going to write a new song.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings